There is a new petition on Change.org asking Obama to become House Speaker in 2018. Not only is it almost charming in its lack of awareness, it is also a reminder that the Left never gives in or gives up. When the personal and the political are the same, when even brushing your teeth is a political act, you’re going to be committed to political activity 24/7.

The petition opens by reminding potential signers that they’re now living with the horror of total Republican control. Worse, Leftist activity, including “protests and lawsuits are not going to be enough to stop Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Sam Alito, and company from rolling back decades of progress virtually overnight, particularly if rank-and-file Republicans feel no pressure to dissent from Trump’s party line.” That reference to “decades of progress” is a funny one, because as best as I can tell, Trump is determined to roll back only 8 years of “progress,” which doesn’t even equal a single decade.

What you’re seeing here is something I’ve written about frequently, which is the Lefts’ belief that the 1950s are always lurking just around the corner with Jim Crow (a purely Democrat initiative), back alley abortions, gays deeply closeted and, perhaps worst of all, men and women playing their assigned gender roles. The fact that Trump was considered a benefactor to the black community before he ran as a Republican or that his initiatives towards gays and sex roles seem to be limited to blocking the federal government from telling schools to ignore biological gender or forcing nuns to buy birth control seems to have eluded J. Q. Adams, the petition’s author.

Panicked at the thought of all these inchoate horrors, Adams asks, “What can be done?”

Well, Adams has a “long-shot” idea. We know it’s a long-shot not only because he says so, but because, after accusing the GOP of gerrymandering Democrats out of federal existence, he admits that it may not have a lot of momentum after what he calls, with magnificent understatement, “the Democrats’ recent difficulties in midterm elections.” Those “recent difficulties” see Republicans with the greatest hold over America at both the state and federal level in more than ninety years.

Adams is a man of faith, however. He believes that, Democrats can block Trump’s momentum, if they can just pick up “24 seats to win the House and 3 to win the Senate.” To do this, after failing in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016, all that Democrats need to do is create “a powerful national message” letting Republicans know that they’re on the hook for everything from “Trump’s bigotry and misogyny, to his trampling of cherished freedoms and democratic norms, to his dangerous foreign policy, and to his plans to privatize Medicare, cut taxes for the rich, take away 20 million Americans’ health insurance, abolish workers’ right to organize and women’s right to choose, and allow climate change to continue unabated.”

With that kind of agenda, Adams concludes that there’s only one man for the job: Barack Obama!

The Progressives’ current outrage about the Electoral College is only the latest example of the world of lies with which they surround themselves. This post examines a few of the more egregious lies that underpin Progressive demands for policy changes to bring America more closely in line with a Marxist paradise.

Before I begin, though, I’d like to set out my three favorite quotations about facts, as opposed to lies:

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” — John Adams, during the summation when he represented British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial.

“Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.” — Bernard Baruch

“When the law is on your side, argue the law. When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table.” — Legal adage

Progressives do an awful lot of table pounding.

Electoral College lies: The Electoral College has been a fixture in American elections since the beginning. Michael Ramirez perfectly explains why its proportionate representation is necessary:

In order to avoid a situation in which the most populous states have a choke hold on the presidency, the Founders determined that, once a candidate achieves a majority in a given state, the weight given to that candidate is a fixed number of votes in the electoral college. It’s irrelevant if the candidate won with 50.1 percent of the votes or 100 percent of the votes. It’s also irrelevant whether the number of votes over 50.1 percent is vast or small. That last point is especially important, because it means that highly populous states cannot run away with the election (see cartoon above). The same holds true, of course, for state representation in the House.

Faced with these unpalatable facts in an election played according to long-standing rules with which the Progressives, including Hillary, were completely familiar, the Progressives have managed to dig up a “constitutional” law professor who announces that the sole purpose behind the Electoral College is to serve as a racist instrument of Southern oppression. Only a Yale legal scholar could argue this type of historic crapola with a straight face:

This is it: the countdown to learning whether Obama will have been successful in fundamentally changing America or whether we can still resurrect something from the wreckage. This is an umbrella post with a variety of articles that touch upon the election, America’s culture wars, politics generally, the Middle East, and other interesting things. The only thing I don’t have here, because Assange keeps promising but not delivering, is a single smoking-gun document that hands Hillary her “go directly to jail” card. Instead, each Wikileak tranche, while confirming Hillary’s and the Democrat’s core corruption and self-interest, fails to be the jail card.

The #NeverTrumpers still have time to reconsider. Some of the people I admire most are #NeverTrumpers. I don’t understand them on the issue and they don’t understand me, but it’s ultimately a good thing that we’re not Democrat herd animals but, instead, have independent minds. Still. . . . Roger Simon makes what seems to me to be a very compelling argument that, no matter how flawed Trump is (and he is very flawed), Hillary will be infinitely worse. We’ll be plagued by a corrupt media, the culture wars on steroids, a level of corruption unimagined in American politics, the constitutional risks of a president under FBI investigation, and the horrors of Hillary’s manifest incompetence.

Trump offers a return to “normalcy.” Peter Thiel, whose gayness the Gay “Baby, I was born this way” Mafia now denies because he supports Trump, made an important point, which is that Trump represents a return to the norm. What the Left offers is no longer even remotely normal. We’ve spent the last eight years in Looking Glass Land, and people are turning to Trump to back away from Progressive insanity.

Hillary’s terrible incompetence. One of the things that’s come through loud and clear with the Wikileaks is that Hillary and Company are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. They’re terrible at what they do, and they get away with it only because they have a media infrastructure that vouches for them (“She has a vagina so, leave Hillary alone!!“). And of course, because that are the bridge connecting money (no matter how dirty or anti-American) to American power and assets.

This is almost certainly untrue, un-sourced rumor, but I couldn’t pass it up. Please keep my caveat in mind: There is no reason to believe that this post, which has the NYPD saying that the Weiner dox are much worse than anyone imagined, is true. However, I can’t resist linking to it to the extent it claims to represent unnamed sources in the NYPD and alleges this kind of stuff:

Samantha Bee, who has a half-hour “comedy news” show, made headlines when she did a segment viciously attacking Catholic hospitals around America. Her premise is that there are too many Catholic hospitals in America, which is a bad thing because the celibate men in charge are guilty of extreme misogyny insofar as the hospitals will not perform abortions or sterilization procedures. Here, see for yourself (WARNING: Extremely vulgar language and savage abuse of men in the Catholic hierarchy):

I won’t bother to address the doctrinal charges Bee makes, or the facts missing from her narratives, because Alexandra DeSanctis already did it for me. The one thing DeSanctis’s post doesn’t address to my satisfaction is Bee’s claim that the Church really believes that it’s better to see both mother and baby dead than to sacrifice the baby (who would die anyway) if it means saving the mother. That really doesn’t sound right. If you have different, or more complete, information I would appreciate hearing it.

Pushing aside the doctrinal questions, the core problem that I see with Bee’s narrative is her failure to address why there are suddenly so many Catholic hospitals (around 600) throughout the United States. Knowing the answer to that question, I understand why Bee ignored it. You see, the answer is — Obamacare. Beginning shortly after Obamacare went into effect, hospitals (the ones that Obama promised people could keep) could not function in the marketplace:

I never go looking for legal work, but when my old clients ask for help, I always say “yes.” They were there when my husband was not established in his career and we had children to feed and rent to pay, so I will be there when they have a deadline they can’t meet without my help. Still, I’m tired, really tired, after a two-day marathon to get a complaint into bankruptcy court. I’ll therefore strive for brevity in this round-up, relying more on quotations from the posts I’m highlighting than on my own commentary.

Nothing Trump says is as radical as anything Obama has done. I think Victor Davis Hanson is a closet #NeverHillary. How else to explain his excellent point; namely, that Trump is much less extreme in his views than Obama has been in his actions. To which I’ll add that the real difference is that the media loathes Trump and adored Obama (and has invested in Hillary despite disliking her). Here’s VDH:

Amid the anguish over the Trump candidacy, we often forget that the present age of Obama is already more radical than most of what even Trump has blustered about. We live in a country for all practical purposes without an enforceable southern border. Over 300 local and state jurisdictions have declared themselves immune from federal immigration laws — all without much consequence and without worry that a similar principle of nullification was the basis of the American Civil War or that other, more conservative cities could in theory follow their lead and declare themselves exempt from EPA jurisdiction or federal gun-registration laws. Confederate nullification is accepted as the new normal, and, strangely, its antithesis of border enforcement and adherence to settled law is deemed xenophobic, nativist, and racist.

The president of the United States, on matters from immigration to his own health-care act, often has declined to enforce federal laws — sometimes because it was felt that to do so would have been injurious to his 2012 reelection bid. The reputations of agencies such as the IRS and the VA no longer really exist; we concede that they are politicized, corrupt, or hopelessly inept. An attorney general being found in contempt of Congress raises no more of an eyebrow than that same chief law-enforcement officer referring to African Americans as “my people” or writing off Americans in general as a “nation of cowards.”

An imperfect Donald is better than a disastrous Hillary. Dennis Prager has finally figured out what we here already grasped which is that, no matter how bad Trump is, Hillary is worse. Moreover, those who refuse to vote for Trump or, worse, promise to vote for Hillary, have become so invested in some abstract purity that they’re abandoning even the possibility of preserving conservative principles in America:

I was recently brought face to face with the nihilism that underlies the Left’s desire for socialized medicine, which they’re sure will bring with it the perfect statistics that routinely gladden socialist nations when the UN or WHO or some other Left-leaning world body compares healthcare statistics in various parts of the world. Invariably, those comparisons always show the U.S. health care system in a poor light. Who cares, of course, that the statistics are utterly bogus? They’re so beautiful to the statist eye.

My insight into this nihilism came during an evening with some friends and neighbors. The story is a bit long but, I think, worth it. It all began when my son expressed dismay at data from his AP Environmental Science text-book:

In 1900 the U.S. infant mortality rate was 165. In 2011 it was 6.1. This sharp decline was a major factor in the marked increase in U.S. average life expectancy during this period. The United States ranks first in the world in terms of health care spending per person, but 54th in terms of infant mortality rates.

(G. Miller, Scott Spoolman, Environmental Science, p. 100.)

My son didn’t want to believe that America, which he thinks is a great country, could rank so low in something as basic as infant mortality. As it happens, I knew that those numbers were wrong, so I immediately spoke up. I got as far as saying “Those numbers are wro…” when a far-Left physician in the room literally shouted me down.

“This is not political. We don’t need to hear any of that right-wing crap. You’re going to turn this in a political argument. This is science.” The other guests looked stunned.

I tried again. “I’m not talking politics. This is about statistics. You need to know that….”

Again, the Leftie physician cut me off. “Little Bookworm, don’t listen to her. She’s just going to go on with her political crap. The problem is with the U.S. medical system.”

I tried again. “Let me finish. This is a statistical problem.”

Leftie cut me off again. “No, don’t go there.”

I ignored him and went there anyway. “Stop!!!” I hollered at the top of my lungs. The room fell completely silent. I finally had my say.

(UPDATE: And looking at that IRS letterhead, please remember those dim, but never forgotten days, when Obama & Co. swore six ways ’til Sunday that this wasn’t a tax, so it didn’t need to originate in the House.)

People seemed to enjoy my last foray into Leftist posters, all of which I found on Facebook, courtesy of Leftie friends. I thought, though, that after subjecting you to the insanity, I’d also include some smart snark from the sane side of the political spectrum. First, though, the crazy stuff, with my comments (if any) following each image:

I find amusing this defense of Obama’s myriad failures — that Republicans have been obstructing him — considering that (a) Obama owned all of Congress for the first two years of his administration and (b) Boehner and McConnell have been his lap dogs for the last seven plus years.

I include the above as an example of the incisive political analysis that characterizes the Left. When people are this ignorant about economics, it suddenly becomes understandable that they are perfectly happy to bypass the collective wisdom of the marketplace and to invest all of their faith in a government bureaucracy.

And speaking of economic ignorance, Bernie continues to amaze. I haven’t been able to find a wonderful poster making the rounds on the Left in which Bernie expresses bewilderment that student loans charge higher interest than mortgages. He seems unclear on the whole concept of security. If I don’t pay back my mortgage, the bank at least gets to keep my house, which may have some value to offset my default. However, when the gal with a major in Womyn’s Studies and a minor in Gender-free Puppetry defaults on her $200,000 student loan from Smith, the taxpayers are left with nothing. There is no value there to offset the default. And Bernie just can’t seem to grasp that when the risk is higher, so is the cost.

Oh, and about those tuition-free four-year colleges in Europe. . . . When I was in England, probably around 20% of English students went on to college. Nowadays, the average seems to float around 30%. In America, almost 70% of graduating students go on to some form of higher education. In other words, more than twice as many students in egalitarian America go on to college as to those in still-class-bound Britain.

In addition, American colleges and universities have become grotesquely expensive, in large part because infusions of federal monies over the past thirty or more years have created a tuition inflation far in excess of the inflation rate in the rest of America. The way in which schools teach calculus probably hasn’t changed over the years, but the necessity of a vast bureaucracy dedicated to lesbians, and another vast bureaucracy dedicated to women, and yet another for blacks, and one more for Hispanics, and a whole hierarchy for disabled people, and this “free” education has taxpayers funding, not education, but a hard-Left propaganda machine that is desperate to get its tentacles into every young person in America.

Once that happens, all of America will be like a college campus. This doesn’t mean that Americans will be learning things and basking in new experiences. It means that Americans will be living a Kafka-esque nightmare of political correctness, the tyranny of microaggression claims and trigger warnings, virulent attacks on men in an effort to destroy them, etc. I don’t want to fund that. Do you?

There are a lot of Bernie posters populating my Leftie friends’ Facebook pages, so I don’t have to hear the man speak to get an idea about his idiocy. In a world with ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and other forms of radical Islam, is he really prepared to head a government that de-funds defense? Obama has already weakened America’s defense almost to the breaking point. Sanders, idealistic to the point of moronic stupidity, seems to want to finish the job, with our only defense against militant ISIS being his plaintive 1960s cry to “give peace a chance.”

Even worse than the fact that Bernie is mouthing this type of idiocy is the fact that so many of my friends — all of whom are college educated incidentally — think this is a great idea.

In other words, according to the Left, freedom of religion means that you are totally free to be religious in the privacy of your home and within the four walls of your house of worship. Otherwise, to the extent religion informs your values, you are a theocratic dictator in the making and you’d better shut up and shut up good.

I’ve tried to tell my Leftie friends that, if they had imposed this view of religious freedom on America in the 19th century, we’d still have slavery, child labor, the 7 day/80 work week, child brides, etc. America’s greatest humanist strides came when people of faith applied those teachings to the world around them.

The asterisk to that statement, of course, is that “It’s OK to change your opinion based on the newest evidence* . . . *unless that evidence proves definitively that the whole anthropogenic climate change mania is built upon theories that have been proven invalid every time they’ve had the opportunity to play out in real time.” Challenge AGW, and suddenly Tyson is all about “shut your mouth.”

Okay — even though I found this on a Leftie Facebook page, I have to agree with it. Even Lefties can be correct occasionally.

Here’s my rebuttal to the above poster:

Yes, my poster attacks the Left’s War on Women meme, but the argument is the same assuming it’s true that Planned Parenthood provides healthcare services for men: Now that we have ObamaCare, why do we still need to pass extra Federal funds on to Planned Parenthood? Isn’t that double-funding the organization. With ObamaCare, it becomes apparent that the only reason to fund Planned Parenthood is to pay for abortions which, theoretically, aren’t supposed to be part of ObamaCare’s funding.

Leftists are stuck in a perpetual time warp. The reason the rest of the industrialized world had free health care is that, for the entirety of the Cold War, America took care of the military costs for all those “free” health care nations. That was really nice of us, but it left us with less money for such self-indulgent things as “free” medical care that was actually funded by America.

In addition, medical care in the rest of the world sucks. Sure, everyone can see a doctor for free, but you might have to wait so long you die or, if you finally do see a doctor, the care is so bad you might as well have died waiting. In other words, the rest of the world gets the same kind of care we foist on our Veterans at the Veterans Administration.

And now, a few words and posters from sane people, none of which need any further comments:

This morning, the Supreme Court issued two decisions. In the case of Obamacare, contrary to long-standing precedent that requires courts first to look at the statute’s wording and then, if that is not helpful, to check out the legislative history that led to that wording (Gruber demonstrates the wording was intentional), Justice Roberts held that it was the Court’s responsibility to rubber-stamp the law. My take is that in so holding, the Supreme Court just rendered itself irrelevant. That is, if it’s no longer looking at the law under a constitutional rubric, but is simply following the legislative desire as stated at the time the Court rules, who needs it?

Or as Justice Scalia says:

The Court’s decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people’s decision to give Congress ‘[a]ll legislative Powers’ enumerated in the Constitution. Art. I, §1. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them. This Court holds only the judicial power — the power to pronounce the law as Congress has enacted it. We lack the prerogative to repair laws that do not work out in practice, just as the people lack the ability to throw us out of office if they dislike the solutions we concoct. We must always remember, therefore, that ‘[o]ur task is to apply the text, not to improve upon it.’ Pavelic & LeFlore v. Marvel Entertainment Group, Div. of Cadence Industries Corp., 493 U. S. 120, 126 (1989).

Trying to make its judge-empowering approach seem respectful of congressional authority, the Court asserts that its decision merely ensures that the Affordable Care Act operates the way Congress ‘meant [it] to operate.’ Ante, at 17. First of all, what makes the Court so sure that Congress ‘meant’ tax credits to be available everywhere? Our only evidence of what Congress meant comes from the terms of the law, and those terms show beyond all question that tax credits are available only on state Exchanges. More importantly, the Court forgets that ours is a government of laws and not of men. That means we are governed by the terms of our laws, not by the unenacted will of our lawmakers. ‘If Congress enacted into law something different from what it intended, then it should amend the statute to conform to its intent.’ Lamie, supra, at 542. In the meantime, this Court ‘has no roving license . . . to disregard clear language simply on the view that . . . Congress “must have intended” something broader.’ Bay Mills, 572 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 11).

With regard to the FHA decision, which apparently says that disparate impact claims can be brought under FHA, I have less to say, because I’ve thought about it less. It strikes me, though, that it gives an activist FHA unlimited power to make up things as it goes along. That can’t be good.

This is a post about Obamacare, but I think it needs to start with my daughter’s great insight about our neighborhood grocery store, which recently sold out to a so-called “high-end chain.” So far, the only thing high about the store under its new ownership it is the prices its charging. It’s selling the same meats Wal-Mart sells (not that there’s anything wrong with that), except that it’s promoting them as boutique specialty meats and pricing them accordingly (and there’s a lot wrong with that). When the neighborhood moms get together, they don’t have a lot of nice things to say about the newly configured market.

I decided to ask my teenage daughter what her peers in the neighborhood had to say about the new store at the same old location. Her answer, which I’m quoting verbatim, was marvelous, and should be read by every Leftist in America:

It’s okay. I like the soups. But otherwise, it’s really expensive. Now that my friends and I are all driving, if we want food, we either go to a restaurant where we can totally order what we want, or we go to Safeway, which is a lot cheaper. Basically, the local market is the kind of place you go when you’re spending other people’s money — like yours, Mom.

Could there be a more perfect statement of the problems that arise from government handouts?

Her little statement resonated especially strongly with me today, because of a discussion I had with a pro-Obamacare person this morning. What sparked the discussion was the fact that both Forbes and the New York Times had Obamacare offerings. Forbe’s offering is an article Steve Moore wrote about the false statements Obama made in a speech claiming that Obamacare was a success. The New York Times offering is a 35-minute-long video following the healthcare travails of a diabetic man in Kentucky, both before and after Obamacare went into effect.

Thanks to global warming, we didn’t have our usual heat wave in May this year but, instead, had a series of extremely cold, often foggy and windy, days. Also, thanks to global warming, we didn’t have our usual three-day long heat wave in the first week of June this year, with the weather instead continuing to be extremely cold, as well as foggy and windy. Today, however, we had a hot day, so I guess that damn global warming is backing off a little.

I spent my day writing legal documents, and shlepping my mother to various appointments. I would have preferred to recline at my computer, reading and writing, while taking sips of a cool ice tea. Still, I am singularly blessed to have paying work and a living mother, so I can’t complain too much. (Or more accurately, I shouldn’t complain too much. Sadly, my temperament being what it is, I’m always capable of complaining.) I’m still working away, making up for work time spent with Mom, but there’s so much I want to share with you, I’ll just sneak in a few minutes of blogging here.

Captain Picard supports embattled British gay bakers

Considering that Patrick Stewart, aka Captain Picard from Star Trek : The Next Generation, is a good, card-carrying British Lefty, I almost fell out of my chair when I read this:

Patrick Stewart has weighed into the ‘gay cake’ debate, saying that he supports the right of the Christian bakers to refuse to ice messages they find offensive.

Ashers Bakery lost a court case after refusing to make a cake with the words “support gay marriage” above a picture of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street.

The McArthur family who own the bakery were found guilty of unlawful discrimination and fined £500.

[snip]

While many celebrated the ruling as a blow for equal rights, Patrick Stewart said that he backed the bakery.

Talking on Newsnight, the actor said: “Finally, I found myself on the side of the bakers.”

Stewart argued that nobody should be forced to write specific text that they disagreed with.

“It was not because it was a gay couple that they objected, it was not because they were celebrating some sort of marriage or an agreement between them,” said Stewart. “It was the actual words on the cake they objected to. Because they found the words offensive.”

He continued: “I would support their rights to say no, this is personally offensive to my beliefs, I will not do it.”

Make it so, Captain Picard! Make it so!!!

Netanyahu goes on the offensive against the world

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going on the offensive, not just against the Muslims raining rockets down on his country, but against a world that sits silent while this happens, only to speak up when Israel dares to respond to these deadly attacks:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the international community on Sunday morning for failing to condemn Gaza rocket fire at southern Israel.

“I did not hear a single member of the international community condemn the attack, and the UN did not say a word,” Netanyahu said. “I’m interested to see if the silence will continue when we act in self defense.”

“It should be clear: the hypocrisy that is sweeping the world will not chain our hands from defending the citizens of Israel,” he added.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government is less than a month old, but it’s already apparent that it is different from its predecessors. And if it continues on its current diplomatic trajectory, it may do something that its six predecessors failed to accomplish. Netanyahu’s new government may improve Israel’s position internationally.

[snip]

The flagship of the diplomatic war against Israel is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

Participants in the movement propagate and disseminate the libelous claim that Israel’s use of force in self-defense is inherently immoral and illegal. Over the years BDS activists’ assaults on Israel’s right to exist have become ever more shrill and radical. So, too, whereas just a few years ago their operations tended to be concentrated around military confrontations, today they are everyday occurrences. And their demands become greater and more openly anti-Semitic from week to week and day to day.

[snip]

The time has come, then, for Israel to take the wheels off the wagon.

For the past dozen years or so, pro-Israel activists in the US in particular have been fighting an uphill, lonely battle against the organizations promoting the BDS movement. Among their top complaints has been the constant refrain that the Israeli government has undermined their actions by standing silent or denying what was happening or treating Israel’s defenders as the moral equivalents of its adversaries.

[snip]

All the while, Israel’s diplomatic standing has gone from weak to incapacitated.

Against this backdrop, statements and actions by the new Netanyahu government are encouraging because, unlike its predecessors, it seems to have stopped playing the fool.

At the outset of this week’s cabinet meeting, Netanyahu spoke out angrily and specifically against the BDS movement and warned that Israel must not blame itself for the BDS haters’ assaults against it.

As he put it, “The last thing we need to do is to bow our heads and ask where we went wrong, where we erred. We have done nothing wrong and we have not erred. We are not a perfect country; we do not pretend to be such, but they are setting standards for us that are both twisted and higher than those for any other country, any other democracy.”

It’s high time Israel stops making nice with her enemies worldwide and, instead, starts calling them out on their gross and blatant hypocrisy. Meanwhile, Israel lives up to her standards by doing everything she can to protect those Druze citizens living in Syria.

Stay classy, United States Air Force

I’m ambivalent about Air Force General Hawk Carlisle’s decision to call an ISIS fighter a “moron.” As all those great cartoons and movies from WWII show, there’s a lot to be said for ridiculing the enemy. However, I think that ridicule somehow works better coming from the public sector, rather than from a high-ranking officer. It seems to diminish his rank, more than it ridicules the enemy.

Be that as it may, I think it’s also bad to boast about using social media to target terrorists. Armed with this knowledge, I suspect that next time the terrorists will be more careful.

Fleischer, who grew up in Monmouth Beach on the Jersey Shore, can recount his grandfather’s tale of survival in dark detail: how he hid in the attic while the Nazis murdered his family; how he was shot three times while trying to escape a concentration camp; how the gun jammed and he was left to die in the heart of winter; how he miraculously survived and slept between horses to stay warm; how he joined the Jewish resistance.

“As far as a fighter, it gives me so much strength in the ring to have his bloodline run through me,” Fleischer says later. “To know that he could survive something like that. It pushes me to reach my goal of becoming a world champion.”

Incidentally, as the same article explains, Jews have periodically made a name for themselves in the boxing world, going all the way back to the late 18th century in England.

A victory in King v. Burwell could unshackle the economy

I wrote here the other day about the fact that a lot of Republicans are worried that, if the Supreme Court overturns Obamacare, Republicans will be in trouble because they’ll be viewed as having destroyed the subsidies that so many Americans have come to know and love. Richard Pecore, however, points to an upside that could and should make all those petty subsidies irrelevant:

Without subsidies, the employer mandate is toothless, because employers are only fined if their uninsured workers go to an exchange and get a subsidy.

Employers who have been struggling to keep their workforce under 50 (where ObamaCare kicks in) and use part-timers (who aren’t subject to ObamaCare) won’t have to worry any more.

Nullifying the employer mandate is likely to ignite a hiring boom.

According to the US Chamber of Commerce, that looming mandate has caused 21 percent of small businesses to reduce workers’ hours, 41 percent to delay hiring and 27 percent of franchises (such as fast-food restaurants) to replace full-timers with part-timers.

People facing a penalty for being uninsured will also come out ahead. Without subsidies, most will be exempted from the penalty, saving them $2,000 on average next year.

Despite Democrats’ dire warnings, the poor won’t be hurt. An amazing 89 percent of people who are newly insured because of ObamaCare are on Medicaid, which won’t be affected.

Thank you, Mr. Pecore, for that cheering reality-check.

“I defaulted on my student loan because I’m an entitle s**thead.”

Lee Siegel has a New York Times opinion piece in which he explains why he defaulted on a student loan secured by the taxpayers of the United States of America. The short version is “I’m an entitled s**thead who chose an expensive college that I couldn’t possibly afford and then, when the bill came due, which would have forced me to take a real job to pay it, I stared deeply into my navel, and decided that, being an entitled s**thead, I could do whatever I wanted and leave the bill to working and middle class Americans.”

If I had my way, the Siegel’s of the world would be prosecuted and, ideally, imprisoned for fraud and various types of theft. Back in the day, I did something weird: I went to colleges I could afford, so I required minimal student loans and, when I left college, I worked hard and spent little so that I could pay off those loans.

Bruce Jenner will always be a mere simulacrum of a woman

D.C. McAllister has an interesting point, which is that being a woman isn’t simply about the proper chromosomes, boobs, vagina, hormones, etc. — instead, it’s about the sum total of our life experience growing up female, which mostly means our life experience going through puberty. Just as boys had the dubious delights of cracking voices and uncontrollable erections, girls got embarrassing in-your-face boobs (or equally embarrassing non-existent boobs) and periods with all the pain, inconvenience, and inevitable embarrassment.

Those experiences are part of who and what we are. We didn’t go to a grocery store to buy the bits and pieces we need, or to have cut off the parts we no longer want. We developed along with our sexual identity.

Incidentally, if you haven’t yet read Mark Steyn’s brilliant post on what it use to mean to be a transsexual, and how the Left has managed to pervert even that experience, drop everything and read it. Here’s the core idea but, as always, Steyn develops it so well, at such length, and with so much elan you must read the whole thing to appreciate it fully:

The coronation of Caitlyn is ultimately not about the right to choose which of the two old teams you want to play on. It’s about creating a cool new team. The “T” was always the relatively sleepy end of LGBT, and didn’t ostensibly have much in common with the other three-quarters of the acronym. The company it keeps only makes sense if the object of transitioning is not to “pass” but to create a new assertive identity group in and of itself.

Feminist Elinor Burkett is irritated by something else, which is that everyone who celebrates Jenner’s coming out party is also reinforcing the old-fashioned, 1950s-style stereotypes of women as emotionally-sensitive bimbos obsessed with clothes and make-up.

I’m sorry for the long silence, but to quote Granny Clampett, “I was just plumb tuckered out.” Between escalating work demands and the usual family demands, I haven’t had either spare energy or spare time. It was only two days ago that I stopped being in denial and accepted that, for the time being at least, I have a 3/4 time legal job that requires a heightened level of commitment and organization. (Incidentally, I’ve found that, for managing large projects, Microsoft’s One Note, when combined with a good calendaring program, is very helpful.) I still intend to blog, but I just need to buff up my time management skills a bit.

“I will do everything necessary and anything possible to de-fund Obamacare.”

Most people, whether Democrat or Republican, agree that Ted Cruz’s planned filibuster in the Senate is doomed. It will do nothing to stop Obamacare’s inexorable path towards implementation. (To understand precisely what the filibuster is about, Ace has a good, short explanation.)

Because Ted Cruz is nobody’s fool, I’m guessing that he too knows that it won’t stop Obamacare from getting fully implemented within the next few months. Why, then, is Cruz engaged in this quixotic effort? I think I have the answer, but you’ll have to bear with me, because it involves taking a little trip back, back in time . . . to the Battle of Thermopylae.